Proposed special session for the International Conference on Romanticism to be held at Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, Nov. 8-11, 2012

Despite several key theoretical texts (Foucault, Sedgwick, Haggerty, Elfenbein) focusing on masculinity and sexuality during the Romantic period, scholars have been surprisingly slow to incorporate such theoretical approaches to masculinity and sexuality. This panel seeks papers that draw on, rework, and/or expand knowledge of masculinity and sexuality during the Romantic period by focusing on catastrophic masculinity. What counted as catastrophic masculinity during the period? How were such masculinities constructed through medical, juridical, religious, social, cultural, subcultural, and other discourses? While papers on the canonical Big Six male poets are welcome, I hope to also include papers that situate catastrophic masculinity within more recent understandings of the ever-expanding Romantic canon, including the novel, drama, poetry regardless of the author's sex, race, or class, and Romantic prose in its various forms between roughly 1780-1830.

In an effort to stimulate scholarship on masculinity and the history of sexuality during the Romantic period, this panel welcomes papers focusing on literary representations of masculinities, bodies, and practices commonly labeled catastrophic, disruptive, or violent during the period.